


Poor Little Rich Boy

by rhenia_ra



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Character Study, M/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-14
Updated: 2011-06-14
Packaged: 2017-10-20 10:05:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/211620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhenia_ra/pseuds/rhenia_ra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The frequency by which he partook in the ritual was not great, and lessened as time went on. It was not often that Charles Xavier wanted to be alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Poor Little Rich Boy

I.

When the day’s cacophony of voices resounded in a certain manner and for a certain span of time, Charles discovered that it was perhaps for the best to—not block them out, as he’d once often tried—but provide them a soundtrack.

He’d begun at the age of nine. Locking the door to his grandfather’s study, he walked with a sort of calculated theater to the desk’s drawer of old, stale tobacco. He filled the russet pipe with care; stopping every so often to weigh the thing a bit in his hands, sniff the dusky sweet of wood and chocolate to make sure, in his way, that he was doing everything correctly. He fiddled with the knob of the radio one-handed, gripping the pipe in the other, already sweating palm. He then sat, enveloped in a plush, leather chair with arms that curled towards his feet— still too close to the upper half of his body to reach the floor—and attempted five strikes to light his first match, the heavy hand of Beethoven passing over his brow.

He imagined, at the time, that it was something his father would have done, and his grandfather before him. Having no real concept of his history, he’d created his own; a naive vision of refined nobility, of deaths by sword, cocked pistols, and, finally, typhoid fever (“Old money,” his mother had once described them with a scoff). Picturing his father, at the right hand of Winston Churchill no less, Charles puffed out his chest in childish importance, only to be winded by the smoke he brought in with it.

And so the voices never quite stopped, and Charles’ mind never quite stopped its mild tempo of collection—however, he did change it up a bit. Puffing and sighing noisily, he conducted an orchestra with each blackened match. He sang along in “Da’s” and “dum’s,” and coughed in a small cloud of smoke when the crescendo of a certain song or thought took him by surprise. He felt refined, a gentleman of worldly proportions, and did not learn to be embarrassed by such a thought for quite some time.

Closing the drawer to the old desk with a firm clunk and closing, after that, the sound of the music that had filled the room, Charles allowed his mind to resume its buzz. When he stepped back into the hall, shutting the study solidly behind him, he felt himself stepping over a threshold to reality, some sort of normality—or, at the very least, the visage of it. The frequency by which he partook in the ritual was not great, and lessened as time went on. It was not often that Charles Xavier wanted to be alone.

 

II.    

The first time Raven discovered him at the age of thirteen, his eyes closed and lips slack around the lip of the pipe, he had turned as brightly red as the Union Jack. 

“How did you get in here?” he asked, shoving the tobacco down as if to hide it from her sight. He wore his grandfather’s dressing gown and it tangled at his waist in its largeness. His hair, pushed back by three fingers of pomade in a style praised by his mother’s society friends, had the great effect of making him look like a drowned puppy.

“I was worried about you,” she said, and had to almost yell over the boom of violins coming from the radio. The only thing that kept his mother, downstairs, from hearing it must have been the sheer size of the house. Raven pulled the peach hands of her current, girl-ish form to her ears. “You disappeared after dinner.”

Charles frowned, pushed himself up from the chair to switch the music off. “I’m free to disappear within the walls my own house, Raven.”

She snorted, eying him up and down. “You certainly seem to _think_ you’re the lord of the place.”

His disappearing blush reddened once more.

 _Don’t be cruel_ , he thought, not meeting her eye. _Not when she’s here._

Raven’s eyes softened and she dropped her hand from where it had balled at her hip. “Charles,” she said, and then thought, _Charles, you can’t hide yourself from me, you know._

He glanced up questioningly.

 _You_ , she projected with force, _are a complete nerd._

He laughed mostly out of surprise and she used the moment to give him a quick embrace.

“Good night,” she said aloud, and turned the radio back on as she left the room.

That night, as she lay in bed, she squelched the foolish thought that said that Charles had, in fact, looked rather dashing.

 

III.

In 1964 and during the midst of a particularly grueling defense of his thesis, Charles purchased a small plastic bag of green shavings, rather than brown, for his pipe; and he sat on the ground, instead of in his usual chair—dragged to his Oxford apartment his first year for exactly that purpose.

His copy of _Hard Day’s Night—_ which had been carefully nicked from Raven’s room that Christmas—was scratched toward the latter portion of Side A, and he coughed along with the stutter of voices, desperately hoping that he would not project his muddled thoughts to the Professors that huddled at the edge of his awareness.

 

IV.

Charles kept his eyes closed, felt the strings of consciousness fade, but remain nonetheless connected, tied to his own—

— and when he opened them, Erik’s hands were already lifting Cerebro from his skull, and the man’s eyes were crinkled with some mixture of concern and a wonder that had still not faded since their first experience with the machine—

 _—adorable lab rat_ , he heard for the second time, and immediately shoved that particular voice to a further reach of mind.

“Charles?” Erik said. “How are you feeling?”

Charles grinned, and was dimly aware that his cheeks felt taut and stretched (had he been doing that the entire time? He must have looked like a maniac). “My—ah, my head hurts a bit.”

Erik shook his head and glared at the space above Charles’ shoulder. “I told you we should have stopped sooner.”

Hank sounded giddy behind him, and seemed to be running between the printed results and the chair, judging by the way his voice came in and out of focus. “He looked like he was enjoying it and—anyway—that was amazing, Professor! Far more names than last time. Exponential!”

Charles tried to grace Erik with his most winning look—a lilt of the eyebrow and a charming smile, shoulder shrugged to one ear. “It was pretty amazing.”

Erik rolled his eyes.

 

 

That evening, he had barely taken one puff from his pipe before he fell asleep; head drooped to the chest of his dressing gown and tobacco falling like eraser shavings in his lap. The music, Puccini this time, boomed on until (he wasn’t sure how long it had been), it stopped abruptly and he sat up, awake.

“Mmph,” he managed to say, upon seeing Erik standing, back rigid as always, in front of the radio. He was dimly aware that he must have slept through Erik’s knocking and that he would have to fix his lock—again—and he slouched back, attempting to resume his previous activity as if he hadn’t fallen asleep. The matches felt like screws between his fingers but slipped in his grasp. A screw stripped of its ridges, then. He tried again.

 _Idiot_ , he heard, and grunted for the second time without looking up.

Erik crossed the room in three strides and took the thing from him before his mind could register the movement. His pulse and about thirty-seven others seemed to be pounding at his left temple at the moment, after all. Erik opened his mouth as if to say something as he stroked the match with deft fingers, but instead stilted his exhalation against the tiny flame now flickering in his palm. Leaning down and cupping a ( _—large—supple)_ hand about Charles’ pipe, he held its warmth to the tobacco, seemed to hold his breath in the process.

Charles inhaled.

Erik turned and crossed his arms, leaning on Charles’ desk. His eyes— never leaving Charles’ form, hunched in the oversized chair— were wide in the dark of the study; his mouth turned down in contrast. He looked every meter, every ounce the elegant, dignified man Charles had been attempting to emulate for the past two decades. Erik, however, would have been a mere servant in his mother’s eyes. “Professor Xavier,” he said, every syllable leaking sarcasm, “Should I call the maid for your evening brandy?”

He was projecting loudly, then.

 _Apologies,_ he thought, but spoke with his pipe still perched in his mouth. “Scotch would be splendid, really.” He tried to raise an eyebrow, wondered if he succeeded.

A bark of laughter echoed through the room, scaring the voices from Charles’ mind in a way that the music had been unable to. He closed his eyes and leaned forward, slowly lowering his head between his legs and dropping the old pipe to the carpet. He groaned, and listened to the tinkle of glass that came from the direction of the bar.

“You don’t actually have to do that, you know,” he said, voice muffled by its position.

“Do you honestly think I’d be doing it if I did?” Erik asked, and he had a point. The man was not a servant. He was—unbroken.           

 _Stop thinking, Charles_.

The feeling of cool glass touched his temple and he leaned into it instead of taking it with his hand. “Mm,” he murmured, and Erik sighed.

The coolness pulled back, then, and Charles leaned forward instinctively, seeking purchase. Before he found it, however, his chin was tilted up, forcing him to stare at the man hovering over him once more. Erik seemed to be trying to look annoyed, but the softness of his presence, the warmth of his hand, and the coolness of the glass that he now pressed to Charles’ brow all seemed to speak otherwise. 

“You’re being very nice,” he said, feeling small and dull as he did so. Perhaps he should be suspicious.

Erik did not pause in his slide of cold condensation across Charles’ forehead. “You’re being very childish,” he said in return.

“M’not,” said Charles, closing his eyes again. He did not bother to say that he’d been doing this—the music, the pipe, the hiding— since he was a child, as the other man probably did not care to hear his privileged history ( _the loneliness of the rich_ , he thought bitterly, and he winced at the vision of numbers etched along the other man’s arm). _Such a child, I am_.

“Your thoughts are even louder than your impudence,” Erik muttered, his voice closer now as he crouched next to the chair.

Charles stiffened. “Sorry.”

The other man laughed softly, pushed the glass at last into Charles’ hand. “You never have to hide who you are, Charles,” he muttered. “Not from me.”

His throat felt dry when he spoke. “I don’t really seem to be able to.”  Coughing, he added. “At least for the moment.”

Erik smiled, and looked so much younger when he did. Charles’ breathe stuttered.

 _I’ll fix your lock tomorrow_ , Erik thought, and Charles caught a mental glimpse of the twisted metal hanging from his door.

 _And now?_

 _Now, I fix the man that has lived by himself his entire life but who still doesn’t know how to take care of himself._ Erik reached out, pulled Charles up by both arms. The smaller man teetered against him.

 _I had Raven_ , he thought petulantly, and allowed himself to be led toward the door.

 _You had Raven_ , Erik acknowledged, _but now you’ve got me._

 

V.

He doesn’t undergo the ritual again, after that.

The pleasure of sitting in his grandfather’s chair has lessened considerably since he is no longer able to feel it beneath him; music offers him none of its previous, youthful air. The pipe had lay abandoned in his desk since, three months ago, he had proclaimed a smoking ban at the school after Hank had singed off a patch of his own fur.

Instead, Charles sits in the childhood room of his cavernous home, the thoughts of his students—sullen, tired, joyous—flickering through him. He presses a glass of cold scotch to his forehead and embraces every voice in the world, save one.


End file.
